Mental Illness In The 19th Century

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Mental illness is a condition that affects an individual’s thinking, feelings, mood and daily functioning. It also affects an individual’s ability to cope with the ordinary demands of life. Serious mental illnesses include depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder and borderline personality disorder. It can affect an individual at any age, race or religion. It can also occur due to illness, personal weakness and poor childhood. Mental illness is treatable and most people diagnosed with a serious mental illness can be treated with an individual treatment plan.

Mental illness has been around for many years but it has never been found out how far back it can be traced. Individuals who suffered from mental illness where seen as being possessed by evil spirits, demons and witches. The witches where seen as being responsible for plagues floods, impotence and where cured by being burned at the stake and the demons where cured by an exorcism or an operation called Trepanning. This operation is done when the patient is awake and involved drilling into the head to release the demons from the brain. Trepanning is still used nowadays but only to help relieve pressure from a swelling brain.

In 1330
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Improvements at the hospital could be seen and in the 19th century the tours for the wealthy where no longer allowed to take place. The patients had also begun to receive better care but mental illness still wasn’t fully understood. The patients where no longer allowed to be chained up and in 1790 the straightjacket was then introduced. The straightjacket is supposed to be used for understaffed asylums to control patients but was never intended to be worn for long periods of time as it could cause blood clots with limbs being restricted. In the first half of the 1900’s when mental illness got the names Catatonia, Schizophrenia, Melancholia and Bipolar

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